While Minister Félix Bolaños sees how the protocol team of the Community of Madrid prevents him from accessing the grandstand that presides over the Dos de Mayo parade, another row begins to rumble in the vicinity of Puerta del Sol. It happens this Tuesday, while Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the regional president, gathers at the Royal Post Office, headquarters of the regional Executive, the cream of Madrid politics. From inside doors, beers, wines and canapés run from hand to hand. And outside doors, under the May sun, dozens of residents of San Fernando de Henares, a municipality of 40,000 inhabitants in the east of the region, hoot, hurt, fed up, desperate. This is their problem: the arrival of Metro line 7B, in 2007, altered the subsoil where their houses sit, filling hundreds of houses with cracks, forcing the demolition of fifty and causing the eviction of 84, according to data from the City Council.
“Houses sunk and lives broken,” reads one sign. “Ayuso, you sink housing and health”, in another. The slogans launched by dozens of people resound against the walls of the buildings on Arenal street, to the extent that the protest (initially authorized at Puerta del Sol) has been expelled so that it does not coincide with the acts of Dos de Mayo. And there are moments of tension. And of anguish. And nervous. The residents want to go to the square, as far as the athlete Fernando Cáliz, suffering from Parkinson’s, who has gone around the perimeter of the Community of Madrid to “give visibility” to those affected by line 7B, a route of more than 700 kilometers that began on April 23. But the police won’t let them.
“We feel tired of seeing how our municipality is sinking, of receiving calls from neighbors who have cracks and that nothing is being done outside ground zero,” says Alejandro Escribano, spokesman for the Platform for People Affected by the L7B Metro, about the injections of cement mortar that the Community has made in 10,000 square meters to try to settle the land. “It’s demeaning,” he complains. “People are tired, but they want to because they are pissed off: there are 24 families sleeping in a park in San Fernando,” he adds.
“We are exhausted,” admits Juan, one of those neighbors who practically sleeps in the open, since he has been taking turns in the tent with his wife and son for 20 days. “This is very hard!”, He continues, because the Administration and the residents are still discussing how much the patrimonial compensation they deserve because the Metro has destroyed their lives should amount. “They have left us on the street. We have no resources. It is incomprehensible that such a rich Community has us like this, especially when it knows that we are the arrowhead, because behind it there will be more affected”.
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The problem arose in 2007, when the then regional president, Esperanza Aguirre (PP), celebrated the inauguration of line 7B, made in a hurry so that it would open just before the elections. Fifteen years later, that route has been closed up to nine times for repairs, resulting in a total of more than three years without service. In parallel, there are hundreds of neighbors who have seen how their houses stopped being habitable. And many families continue to live between cracks, dark noises and the permanent fear that the roof will collapse on them, despite the Community’s million-dollar investments in the area to try to fix a problem that does not stop growing.
Some politicians remember them this Tuesday while they go about their business in the immense granite patio that is in the heart of the Royal Post Office. There is, for example, the PSOE candidate for the regional presidency, Juan Lobato, who is accompanied by the mayor of the town, Javier Corpa, also a socialist, to make the problem visible in the middle of the institutional act. Because Corpa doesn’t talk. But Corpa is. And that’s enough, because he wears an orange reflective vest with the symbol of the association of those affected. His protest is both silent and loud. Because among so many suits, so many sequins, so many ties, and so many messages from marketing Politically, that orange hurts the eyes as only reality and the drama of the neighbor who sleeps on the street can hurt.
“I have done it because it is the day of the people of Madrid, and there are people from Madrid who have been tried to silence and who have a serious problem in the region without the Community listening to them,” explains Corpa. “We have been told that the neighbors are violent, that they have received large compensation, which is false, and it was a day to make their situation visible.”
A line of demand that is also maintained by Alejandra Jacinto, the Podemos candidate for the presidency of the Community of Madrid, who later also supports the neighbors in the demonstration, such as Pepe Álvarez, from the UGT, and trade unionists from CC OO Madrid.
“This Dos de Mayo could have decorated the residents of San Fernando de Henares; However, they have been prohibited from concentrating in the Puerta del Sol while a propaganda booth of the Popular Party has been authorized”, Jacinto maintains still in the Royal Post Office. And then, already on the street, he adds: “The residents of San Fernando demand decent housing and fair compensation after the electoral botch of Esperanza Aguirre, which is now consumed by Isabel Díaz Ayuso.”
All this occurs the same day that the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, tries to access the box that presides over the civic-military parade of Dos de Mayo; on the same day that Begoña Villacís, leader of CS, wears a coat with a written claim (“This Villa neither surrenders nor surrenders”); or in the same hours that Luis Cueto, from Recupera Madrid, complains between fuss that the deputy mayor speaks while he intervenes before the press, and misleads the staff. Because while politicians suffer for theirs, outside, the residents of San Fernando suffer for everyone’s.
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